U.S. Web firms aid in repression

Today, many Americans get the news by reading
the headlines on the Yahoo!, Google or Microsoft Web portals. Many more
Americans learn about current events by using a search engine from one of
these companies. In China, however, such behavior can get you thrown in
prison - sometimes with the cooperation of the U.S. companies that tout
their supposed commitment to goodness and freedom.

Last year, assistant editors of Dangdai Shang Bao (Contemporary
Business News)held a staff meeting about a memo sent from national
Communist Party headquarters ordering journalists how to cover the
anniversary of the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square murders, in which
peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing were slaughtered by the
Red Army.

Reporter Shi Tao wrote a summary of the meeting, and used his Yahoo!
e-mail account to send it to the Asia Democracy Foundation, a group in New
York State that supports Chinese democracy. The group published the
report, anonymously, on the Web site Democracy Forum and their newsletter
Democracy News.

The Chinese dictatorship asked Yahoo! to help them find the person who
had sent the message. Yahoo!'s subsidiary in Hong Kong complied, and Shi
Tao was arrested and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After Reporters Without Borders (www.rsf.org) broke
the story on Sept. 6, 2005, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang blandly replied
that "To be doing business in China, or anywhere else in the world, we
have to comply with local law."

Indeed, Yahoo! is so enthusiastic to comply with "local law" - however
tyrannical and unjust - that in 2002 Yahoo! signed the "Public Pledge on
Self-Discipline for the China Internet Industry" (www.isc.org.cn/20020417/ca102762.htm).
Thus, explains Reporters Without Borders, a Chinese Web user who runs a
Yahoo! search query for a controversial topic such as "Taiwan
independence" will "retrieve only a limited and approved set of results."
If "you try to post a message on the subject in a discussion forum, it
never appears online."

Google and Microsoft have also signed the so-called "Responsibility"
code. After the Chinese government blocked Google in 2002, Google modified
its Chinese search engine. Google maintains on its own servers a cache of
various Web content, so a Chinese surfer previously might have been able
to find forbidden content by using the Google cache, rather than reading
the content directly from a banned Web site.

In June 2005, Microsoft admitted that it had imposed filters on its
Chinese weblogs to block "forbidden words" such as "freedom," "democracy"
and "demonstration."

Reporters Without Borders also reports that much of the Chinese
Internet runs through routers sold by Cisco Systems, which Cisco modified
to allow searches for "subversive" key words, for visits to prohibited Web
sites, and for the transmission of "dangerous" e-mail. Ethan Guttman's
book Losing the New China: A Story of American Commerce, Desire and
Betrayal,supplies details. Cisco admits to having modified the
routers for the Chinese government, but accepts no responsibility for how
the modifications are employed.

The Rocky Mountain Newsmentioned the Shi Tao case in a
three-paragraph item in the Sept. 7 Business Briefs, and reported more
broadly on American complicity in Chinese Internet censorship in an Aug.
15 business story from Bloomberg. The Denver Posthas not given the
issue serious attention in 2005.

"Don't be evil" is Google's corporate motto. Microsoft defends its
corporate interests on a "Freedom to Innovate Network."

But the noble phrases are contradicted by the misuse of freedom, by
cooperation with evil, by assisting the technological advancement of what
the Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society calls "the
most extensive, technologically sophisticated, and broad-reaching system
of Internet filtering in the world."

The evil behavior of American companies in China directly endangers
Americans. First of all, the dictatorship censors news about health
problems, such as the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory System (SARS);
suppression of the news about an epidemic significantly increases the
chance that an epidemic could spread internationally.

More broadly, the censorship impedes democratic reform in China, and
deprives the Chinese people of truth about their government's violations
of human rights, about ethnic suppression in Tibet, and about Taiwan's
right to remain independent. Thus, China suppresses popular opposition to
dictatorship and to an invasion of Taiwan, which some observers believe
could occur soon, and which would likely lead to war with the United
States.

The architecture of repression which the American companies and their
Chinese paymasters are creating could easily be exported to regimes in
other nations.

A Washington Posteditorial (Sept. 18) suggested that the
American companies may be violating the 1989 federal law forbidding the
sale of "crime control and detection" equipment to China. Unfortunately,
the Commerce Department under the Bush, Clinton, and Bush presidencies has
often been lax regarding Chinese exports. Perhaps only consumer and
shareholder pressure can persuade the American companies to change their
evil ways.

Make a donation to support Dave Kopel's work in defense of constitutional
rights and public safety.

Nothing written here is to be construed as
necessarily representing the views of the Independence Institute or as an
attempt to influence any election or legislative action. Please send
comments to Independence Institute, 727 East 16th Ave., Colorado 80203. Phone 303-279-6536. (email) webmngr @ i2i.org